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If you are planning to print to paper or film with your final document, then there are some helpful hints to make life a little easier for you and your service bureau operator: Use Blends, Not Graduated Fills. Blends that are created to match your printer's resolution and the line screen you intend to use print more than two times faster than graduated fills covering the same area. This assumes that you're not pasting the blend inside another object, which takes longer. For more information creating blends instead of graduated and radial fills, see your applications manual. Use Filled Objects, Not Clipping Paths. Illustrator users are used to creating fountains by creating a blend and then placing the blend objects inside a clipping path. That may be fine for Illustrator, but in Freehand you should avoid doing this whenever possible. It takes over five times as long to print as a simple graduated fill of the same path. Use Duplicated Objects, Not Tiled Fills. Tiled fills are wonderful - as long as you're basing them on objects with basic lines and fills. As soon as you create a tiled fill containing a graduated or radial fill, watch out! Tests show that tiled fills containing complex objects take more than twice as long to print as an identical series of duplicated objects. Remember that Page Size Equals Printer RAM. The size of your page corresponds directly to the amount of printer RAM consumed when you try to print the publication. A 4 x 4 inch card centered on a letter size page takes almost twice as much time to print as the same card laid out on a 4 x 4 inch page. Increase Flatness Whenever Possible. When you're printing to a high-resolution imagesetter, the difference a flatness setting of 3 and a flatness setting of 0 isn't noticeable, but the path with a flatness of 3 prints almost four times as quickly as the same path with a flatness setting of 0. Don't Draw What You Can't See. Your printer has to process everything on your publication's page, so why make it work rendering objects that will never be seen on the printed publication? Simplify Your Paths. Avoid drawing objects using lots of points. I mean points of 100 or more in a path, especially if you plan to scale that path down. If you're working with complex paths created by autotracing images, you should consider splitting the path into smaller segments. Scan Grayscale and Color Images at No More Than Twice Your Line Screen. When you're scanning images, it's natural to assume that you should scan them at the highest resolution available from your scanner to create the sharpest possible scans. In fact, image data scanned at a resolution greater than two times the screen frequency you intend using to print your publication does not add significantly to the sharpness of the images, and may even harm the image quality. Don't Import Things When You Don't Have To. Whenever possible, always "Paste" rather than importing and exporting EPS graphics. If you have an Illustrator EPS, go to the original file and copy the element and Paste it in your publication (the same for Freehand or the application you are using). Placed EPSs take up to 16 times as long to print as the same images pasted from another file. What Makes A File Hard To Print. TIFFs, Postscript fills and lines, custom fills and lines, graduated fills, radial fills, composite paths, and paths with lots of points and curves all do their part to increase the amount of time your publication spends churning around in a printer's RIP. Postscript Errors. At some point it will happen if it hasn't happened yet. The dreaded Postscript error. Postscript errors seldom say what they really mean. Almost all of the Postscript errors that have the word "VMError" in them mean that your printer's run out of memory while processing the document. If you see error messages with the word "limitcheck" in them, something in your document is pushing your printer (or Postscript) past an internal limit. If you see these errors, you're going to have to apply some or all of the golden rules to your publication. In particular, try splitting some of the more complex paths and increasing the flatness in your publication. There are two errors that have to do with downloadable fonts that are easily fixed.
If you see an error containing the word "syntaxerror" you've made a mistake in one of the custom Postscript fills or lines you're using. Sending A File To A Service Bureau. Things to remember:
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